Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday April 11, 2011 @03:42PM
from the unlocking-the-mysteries-of-your-salt-shaker dept.

kkleiner writes "The German Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration recently reported the development of a camera with a lens attached that is 1 x 1 x 1.5 millimeters in size, which is roughly as big as a grain of salt. At about a cubic millimeter in size, this camera is right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided. The camera not only produces decent images but is also very cheap to manufacture — so cheap, in fact, that it is considered disposable."

That's an interesting take on the situation... except you still have to hook it up to a power supply and a recording system in order for it to be useful, and provide some sort of environmental shielding around the camera and the cable. The bulk of a camera today isn't found in the sensor.

That's all okay. It doesn't have to look like a camera. And you don't have to look like you're filming anything, so nobody can identify the cameraman. So even with their twisted interpretation of wiretap law, nobody can be charged. You might not be able to use the video (nor want to, without giving yourself away) as evidence in court, but you can still tag the cop on youtube.

1. The image is 250 x 250 px at 44 fps.
2. It's so tiny that there's no way it could have a useful FOV for anything macroscopic, much less be able to focus on anything more than a few cm away.
3. This is medical technology we're talking about, so there's probably a hundred-thousand licensing fee to even look at it, even if the camera itself is only a few pennies.

TFA doesn't really say much about the cost, but if they follow the general trend of high-tech gizmos, they'll probably be as cheap as peanuts in a few years, if not sooner. As for the FOV, you could put a dozen of these in an array, like an insect eye, and then construct a high-res image in software. As a bonus, you'd also get some range info and limited 3D possibilities.

Very true, but unfortunately the "general trend of high-tech gizmos" isn't the only factor at work here. The same principles that keep the US cellular network wrapped up in ridiculous pricing are at work in technology intended for hospital use in most developed countries, even moreso because of insurance affordances. The developer will probably never let that gem out of its grasp, as they risk cutting into their own monopoly; at least, not without hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees first. Not

Cheap is relative. Most of these cameras are used to avoid surgery or other invasive procedures. Remember, a lot of these types cameras are intended to be swallowed. Which means, even if the camera costs a couple thousand dollars, its cheap. I honestly doubt they are anywhere near that expensive, but my point releases, "cheap" is relative.

There are objects which are large enough that you can see them, provided they are in a place where you can see them (this place depends on the size of the object). This includes stars, plantes, tennis balls, flees. Then there are objects which are so small that you cannot see them with the naked eye, regardless of where they are. This includes electrons, atoms, molecules, bacteria. The limit of things you can see is somewhere between bacteria and flees. It definitely is much smaller than

I don't know what would be more amazing. People confusing a 1mm cube for a "grain of salt", or people being unable to see a 1mm cube object without aid. That's like the size of a ball bearing, or short grain rice! I didn't realize SI units were this hard to grasp...

Oh good, I'm not the only one who noticed that a grain of salt is smaller than a match head. I thought for a moment they were talking about the little dot in the middle of that thing, not the whole device itself. Whew... I may not use mm to measure very often, but I didn't think my perception of it was that off.

A 1mm cube seems to be a pretty good match for a grain of salt [seul.org] and while that is certainly not invisible for the human eye, if you watch it from a meter away you could certainly run into trouble finding it.

A tiny camera won't do much good for you if you are thinking only of prostate cancer. For that you can use the PSA blood test, but after an anomaly is identified you will have to be subjected to the touch exam. Unless someone makes a device to measure the prostate's volume, texture, density, etc., which will definitely not be a camera.

That's what I thought too. TFA doesn't say, but the press release (one of the "sources" listed in TFA) indicates that they'll be bringing disposable endoscopes to the market in 2012 for "only a few euros".

Also, "decent" image = 250x250 pixels at 44 FPS. No indication of whether it's color or grayscale, but I suspect it's grayscale. The press release says it supplies "razor-sharp pictures", but I suspect that's only by comparison to existing endoscopes...

It's likely grayscale, but you just put three of them together, one with a red filter, one with a blue filter and one with a green filter and you've got color. 250 x 250 isn't near good enough for medical endoscopy, but you obviously can stack a couple of them together in an array - that's old tech. Extra points for making a radial array and reconstructing a nearly 360 degree image.

Probably greyscale. They didn't say how large the imager is, but it can't be larger than 1mm x 1mm, probably a bit less, which means even at 250x250 pixels you're dealing with 2um or smaller sensors. From the look of the tiny pinhole of a lens, they're probably already diffraction limited on resolution. To get color using the typical Bayer pattern, you'd need to go to 1um or smaller sensor sites. Ouch!

In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.

Yes, because the billable time for the techs, the cost of certification of the equipment and various other overhead costs nothing.

I think the point is that if the various overheads you mention are on the order of $5000, an extra $500 "disposable" camera is reasonable, even if in other contexts the idea of throwing away $500 worth of equipment seems unreasonable...

And an exploding ball of gas a million miles apart can be much harder to see than a spec of dust. I'd say whoever came up with that statement is kind of retarded, even ignoring the lack of a distance to the object. After all... compare a single pixel - . - to 1mm x 1mm. That's at least an order of magnitude smaller, yet I can see it comfortably from 3 feet away.

"US Navy reveals a a new battleship that is smaller than the human eye can see*

*if the human is 5 million miles away from said battleship"

Reasonably, 'at the size limit the human eye can see' to me means exactly that. There is a size below which you can't see unaided, no matter how close you bring your eye to the object because there's a limit to how closely your eye can focus. That size is at least one, and probably 2 orders of magnitude smaller than this camera.

Just as a comparison, the capacitor in this image [gjcp.net] is about 0.75x0.75x1mm - and I really only use the USB microscope if I need a photograph of the board to show any water damage or anything like that. The transistor below it is about the same size as this camera. I don't even use a magnifier for parts that large.

There are some SMT parts that actually *are* the size of a grain of salt. I *do* use a magnifier for those.

There used to be an ad running in EE Times, showing a bunch of gains, with the caption "the larger ones are pepper" -- an add for someone's 0201 passive components, I think. These are 0.6 mm × 0.3 mm, and you can definitely see them, though forget it if you drop one on the floor. Still, much better under a microscope. I once hand soldered an 01005 part (0.4mm x 0.2mm) under a microscope... not easy. And yeah, you can see it without the scope, but not well enough to really recognize it as anything but a

I used to work doing single-crystal X-ray crystallography, one part of the job was mounting a crystal onto the tip of a tiny glass rod. I was looking for a single crystal no larger than 0.5 mm in any direction, and hopefully at least 0.1mm in the smallest dimension, though at times they were smaller than that if they were needles or thin planes. I would sometimes work under a not particularly powerful magnifying glass, though it's quite possible to see a crystal that size with the naked eye, even colorles

Make this wireless, and people wont have to have giant tubes stuck down their throat during endoscopy.
Or keep the giant tube, shove a whole bunch of these boys in, and create street view of the entire digestive system...

Pill sized disposable endoscopes already exist, though much larger than this. Most combine some sort of light with them as well because without it they are fairly useless. This won't perform anything novel when it comes to endoscopy but rather has more potential patient compliance as well as novel imaging of smaller pathways rather than just upper and lower GI.
(Example: http://www.wolfsonendoscopy.org.uk/capsule-endoscopy-information.html [wolfsonendoscopy.org.uk])

An object 1x1x1.5mm is near the resolution limit of the human eye? This is ridiculous. Human hair is finer than that and I remember in grad school being able to see pulled glass fibers a few microns in diameter (without a microscope).

Jet Propulsion Laboratories has come out with a 3D camera, for brain surgery (developed in conjunction with a brain surgeon). It's not as small as this, but it's the size of a coffee bean. The constraint was 4mm; that's the largest passage they can make in a brain without causing serious harm.

this could be a boon for laparoscopic surgery in the third world. if the camera is small enough and the resolution high enough, you could add cheap LED lights and slip it into an incision. That way you would have a laparoscopic camera without expensive fiber optics since the light source and the camera are within the body. This compounds the lower cost of the camera, making lap surgery cheaper for poor people